Monday, December 17, 2012

The red light on our kitchen stove when one or more burners are on, or something is baking in the oven.

The sections of glass in the Tiffany lamp under which our cat sleeps: buttons of amber, a butterfly with red and black wings, green leaves and white morning glories with yellow stamens.

The moon.

The tiny green light flashing in the lawn of an apartment building one night that caught Roberta’s attention while we were walking home from Café Vita. We were mystified. I bent down to look more closely. It turned out to be a warning light for a small lawn sprinkler.

The band of light on the CD player in our ’94 Subaru that flashes “reading” or “untitled” whenever we slide a CD in for play.

The Hall of the Eye at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.

The colors in a dream.

Cephalopod luminescence.

Roof top cab signs.

The Christmas lights in the small glass jar covered with white lace that is currently situated beneath a large pine bookcase whose sides I carved in the front yard of a friend in the Santa Cruz mountains near Los Gatos and whose pattern I took from a book on Viking carving and consists of birds sitting amid foliage with berries in their beaks.

Traffic lights.

Motel signs, particularly the ones found way out in the desert, or great plains, in places like Kansas, or Missouri. The pop and ice dispensers at such motels. The silhouettes behind the curtains.

Streaks of orange and violet and gold at sunset.

The Nocturnal House at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo which housed fruit bats, a two-toed sloth and three-banded armadillo and had to close in 2010 due to budget constraints. I miss seeing the fruit bats hanging upside down, cocooned in their membranous wings, silent and still except for the occasional wriggle.

Bright yellow leaves constellating the sidewalk in late fall after it has freshly rained.

Saturday, December 15, 2012

We entered the castle at
dawn. The dim light feebly illumined an array of antiques and medieval weapons.
Bats dangled from the high vaulted ceiling, enfolded in membranous wings. What
were once chandeliers radiating light were encrusted with webs and the ancient
wax of long dead candles. Our flashlights dazzled the walls. There were
peacocks and angels, cherubs and robed women playing dulcimers. Reptiles
skittered by. The strange predications of their skin displayed bright,
iridescent colors and scales. A tall man in a black leather jacket, sunglasses,
white cane, long shaggy hair and beard descended in a rickety elevator and
introduced himself as Count von Zinzendorf, the legendary barista of Café
Radis, who had long since retired and now spent his days reading old volumes in
braille and feeding and stroking his reptiles. “How did you do it?” I asked.
“How did you make those amazing coffee foam designs. Each one so unique, so
spectacular, and you, a man who has been blind from birth.” “I feel a stirring
in my blood,” he said in a voice so velvety it seemed itself to be the stuff of
coffee foam. “I nimbly accept the toss of ocean waves. I feel the universe
throbbing in my bones. I weigh the noise of my brain. As the world turns, I
hear the calliope of our journey make its music in my wrists and fingers. My
hands become birds, deft as the swallows that swoop the meadows of summer. And
then the images come. I feel them as my hands trace their character and shape
in the beverage. Would you like some coffee now?” He asked. I was breathless.
“Yes, I would love some.” We entered the room where kept a number of espresso
machines and samovars and jars full of tea. He produced two lattés and went to
work, his hands quick as a magician’s making birds appear and disappear. “All
my nerves shout summer when I do this,” he said. “I feel the glow of a thousand
mornings and the deep peace of a Montana night, all simultaneously. Because
this is the essence of coffee. It is morning and night in a single beverage.”
When he finished, I looked at the images on the surfaces of the latté. In one
was the face of a beautiful woman. In the other, was mine own face. Years later
I married that woman whose face floated momentarily in that magnificent mug.
Her name was Evelyn Lovelace, and she was a barista at the Café Mousse.

I smear stirring apples. Ultimately a teeming life
attends an ablution.

Pin drink to jabber. Thumb phonograph we exult. Take
adaptation to a door and open it. Chemistry makes us immediately Parisian.

Serious neck I buckle. The surface pullulates your
chat. The taste beyond glide discharges frames. Bacteria thrash in the boat.
The jackknife represents its squirts. The canoe extrudes cotton. Talk unfolds.
We hurry to bewilder it with rags.

There is heft after the calliope ghost shows us
death. Handsprings hunt the load. The tug is a form of configurational biology.
Myriad predicaments hold my thesis. Triangles and fiddlesticks sizzle with
value. The cloth ship has a pommel. The headland spins my bomb. I pounce on a
quark and wedge it into a potato.

Rough appointment that a resilience beguiles. Butter
your hope along. Throw the rumor. Reflect winter vertebrae. A linen is organic
tea. Map skin with severity, as wrinkles house detail. A cloud they ponder in
greeting is celebrated with machines. My bouillon cab is parked there. We strum
our floats with raspberry wheels. Bend by pumpkin agreement. Tell branches we
are discriminating. We collide. We carry chrome. We pack our grandeur with
deformed bologna.

My feeling evolved from a Fauve palette. Scratch a
gargantuan swallow and you will get a gargantuan transcendence. Muscle before
flapping. Grow a caress. My shiver falls into milk. The play carries
appearances of tickling. Chisel a lotus convulsion to go with the amusement of
dirt. Urge wool. Suppose they pull a garish milieu and fly it into
articulation. Suppose the stream accepts its own subversion. The blooms are
busy selling ions. Age describes what I turn into. Peacocks are examples of
eyes. Hills fulfill themselves in books.

Rattle the occurrence clean. They cut sawed
cartilage here. I absorbed a pink scratch. Buffalo Bill emerged from the back
room yearning for coffee. The office joined in a play. Toys consonant with
power were strewn about the room sneezing sidewalk narratives.

My writing weighs noise. It is a dry argument I
hold. The grammar literally aches.

A bikini eyeball shouts summer at a plume of steam.
The gray sigh haunts a ganglion of sexual parenthesis.

Birds amid apples grow into Bohemia. Linger in a
hectic parody. I perceive house paints. The library swims with architecture.
Willow expands the potential of dirt. Reality shines among the rocks. The story
burns into beards. A journey punches sails. We dream beside the nails remembering
the construction of riddles during the time of the slow simulacrum.

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

I hear a man with a hammer in the fog of the
morning. Electricians with drills. The grind of the drill. The elation of an
open garage filled with the obduracy of rags and paint cans and odd bits of
machinery. Why elation? A convocation of things is always an elation.

The fabric of time is sewn with minutes and hills.
It gets hot around experience. Sand demands the song of the shaping wind.
Behavior calls for movies. Behavior is strange and we need to understand it. We
need to see it on screens. Animal behavior. Human behavior. Humans acting like
animals. Animals acting like humans. People in the underground rushing through
turnstiles. The ocean regenerating itself with fish and fire.

The fathoms below are black as velvet and punctuated
with the drift of luminous organisms. I am lost in thought. Rails walk into
Mexico shouting sunlight and steel. What is inside of us is outside of us and
what is outside of us is inside of us. Skin is not a barrier. It is a medium.
It respects the vigorous air of winter and longs for the heat of summer. The
smell of a potato dug from the earth. Shoveled up steaming and subterranean.

Here is a totem of whales and seals. Here is Jack
Kerouac in an attic in Los Gatos unleashing a river of words. Here is a garish
symptom of language declaring itself to be a hippopotamus.

I drive a taxi. It floats on butterfly wheels. I
hover over the traffic. I pollinate traffic lights. They blossom into green.
They blossom into red. They blossom into yellow and cause brief interludes of
ambiguity.

My skin is mapped with experience. Not tattoos,
wrinkles. Folds. Can you hold this theme a moment while I go put on a sweater?

Supposition is the art of sewing abstractions to water.
I toss pronouns into the museum to hear them echo. I write on a black table in
a coffeehouse at the bottom of the hill. A setter looks up at a man in a parka
with a fur collar while a bald barista makes him a latté. A velvety voice
issues from the speaker above my head: Nina Simone on piano accompanied by a
cello. The candle is an arm of light reaching for the stars.

Depth juggles space. Consonants are toys. Vowels are
power. Or is it the other way around? Space juggles depth. Vowels are toys.
Consonants are power. Syllables brim with tinctures of dream. Nerves flourish with the sparkle of a bicycle. One can perceive perception and sew it together.
Sew it together with words. Sew it together with hammers and flares. A battle.
An itinerary. A commonwealth.

Sunday, December 9, 2012

When sensations are converted to words, they become
iodine. They become cartilage and bone. They rattle. They dry into sidewalks.
They extrude paradigms crackling with calliope ghosts.

Would you like a slice of sexual algebra? A piece of
fruit? There is a Cézanne still life above the sideboard. It is full of fruit.
Help yourself. Though you will have to eat it with your eyes.

Is there symmetry in space? I don’t know. How could
there be symmetry in space? Space is not a thing. Space is a no thing. Or is it
a thing indeed? Space is the final frontier. These are the voyages of the
starship Harpsichord.

Reflections on the surface of the water display the
loom of the weather. The gray sky sighs with the dreams of birds. Picasso stirs
a pot of beans. Autumn floats into winter. Winter is now ubiquitous. You cannot
shoot winter with a shotgun. You can only endure it. Butter a hope with a long
seclusion. Chisel a fiction out of the air if the air is willing and the chisel
is real. And the winter is long and the days are short. And all of your pronouns are harnessed to the
syntax to a sparrow.

I admire the grandeur of the asterisk. Who cannot
tremble at the sight of such a little star?

Structure defines. Chaos excites.

The bow of the violin apprehends the strings and
seduces them into sound. It sings of beads of water on a black table. It sings
of consonants pumped from a well of vowels. A wisp of incense unveiling a
current of air. A blue van backing out of a 7-11 parking lot. The creak of an
elevator in an old hotel. A tidepool loud with color. Buffalo on a voyage to
the stars.

There is a charm in imperfection. Red hills
perforated by a blue sky. A tug followed by the ghost of an atmosphere. Flaws
in the ice of an alpine lake. A bit of blue plastic sticking out of a white
drawer. The myriad predicaments of a gas station on Highway 99. Seeds. Pinochle.
Topaz.

Palpitating secrets mark the beginning of indigo. The
ocean washes over the wheel of the ship. There is a spectacle of blue at the
end of this paragraph. No one knows what it is. It could be Hamburg. It could
be headlights pinned to the night.

The bistro is imbued with rumination. Outside, rain
percolates to the roots. Thin black branches silhouetted against a gray sky,
tangled and complicated and delicate, like nerves.

Nerves are nervous according to the ways of the
pumpkin. This is how art answers the enigma of sand. All those fine little
ripples shaped by the wind. Mountains ablaze with an alpaca morning.

About Me

John Olson is the author of Backscatter: New And Selected Poems, from Black Widow Press, Souls Of Wind, a novel about the notorious French poet Arthur Rimbaud in the American West, from Quale Press, and The Nothing That Is, an autobiographical novel from Ravenna Press. Larynx Galaxy, a collection of essays and prose poetry, appeared in June, 2012, from Black Widow Press. The Seeing Machine , a novel about French painter Georges Braque, appeared from Quale Press in fall 2012.